In applications involving video displays, there is oftentimes a need for the display to include both a video screen as well as a graphics screen. These two elements may be mixed on a display if the hardware utilized is capable of performing such an operation. A common problem arises, as using multiple video buffers for each video image tends to consume large amounts of memory as well as bandwidth. Additional problems arise in the case where a hardware system only has the capacity to utilize one video buffer.
FIG. 1 depicts a conventional process 100 in a system where two video buffers 110, 120 are utilized to mix multiple video images 112, 114 with a graphics frame 130 to produce a display frame 140 simultaneously containing both the video images 112, 114 and the graphics frame 130. In this conventional process 100, a first image 112 is loaded into a first video buffer 110 and a second video image 114 is loaded into a second video buffer 120. The video buffers 110 and 120 are sized as if the first image 112 and the second image 114 were to be full-size images and each displayed in the full display window. The two video buffers 110, 120 are then mixed with the graphics frame 130 and the video images 112, 114 are scaled to produce the display frame 140 as shown with both video images 112, 114. As stated previously, this process takes up a considerable amount of memory and bandwidth as multiple full-size buffers are needed when multiple video images are present.